Investments support for Sustainable Development Goal 7: Research gaps in the context of post-COVID-19 recovery

Abstract

Successful achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy, is impossible without proper financial support, especially after the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite more than million academic papers related to SDG 7, only very few of them address the financial aspects of achieving SDG 7. To test the hypothesis, “SDG 7 related academic studies ignore the issue of investment in general and responsible investment in particular”, a meta-analysis is performed that includes a number of specific instruments and technics such as SciVal by Elsevier, VosViewer, Google trends, Google Books Ngram Viewer and Google Data. The results show a lack of appropriate academic support (methodology, empirical results, econometric models etc.) for practitioners to fill the existing financial gap and successfully achieve SDG 7. Among 1.2 million SDG 7 related papers, less than 100 deal with the financial gap problem measured by trillions of dollars in achieving SDG 7. This paper identifies the most promising and relevant topics for study related to SDG 7 and investment: the impact of the pandemic on decisions in the energy sector; efficiency of SDG 7 investment support and methodology for its assessment; green bonds, green loans, sovereign green bonds as responsible investment tools to advance SDG 7.